How did the Greens end up fumbling so many left and progressive votes to the Lib-Dem neoliberals?

Under the circumstances the Green Party did pretty poorly at the European elections.

Yes I know I'm going to have to explain this in light of the fact that they won their biggest share of the vote since they bagged 14.5% in 1989, and their most seats ever with 7 MEPs, and got the wonderful Magid Magid into the European Parliament to represent the Yorkshire and Humber region that was electing the BNP there just 10 years ago.

12% of the vote is an improvement on the Green performance last time around, but under the unique political circumstances it's actually a pretty poor showing.

The Greens should have done really well because they're unambiguously on the progressive side of the three most burning political issues of our time.

Their name alone is evidence enough that they're serious about combating environmental degradation, they've been campaigning against the blight of ruinous Tory austerity since well before Jeremy Corbyn took Labour back from the orthodoc neoliberals and put an end to the austerity-imitating gibberish that lost them the 2015 General Election, and they're unambiguously opposed to Brexit.

Add in the stuff like the Extinction Rebellion protests, the School Strikes for Climate Action, ever growing awareness of the mess we're making of this planet, and we've got to be left asking if 2019 wasn't the time for the Greens to break through into the political mainstream, when will it be?

There's plenty of ground for arguing that their obsession with an "another roll of the dice" referendum is a massive waste of Green political energy, but there's no doubt that if you're a social progressive who really wants to stay in the EU so much you'll gamble everything on a referendum despite the Tories still in power to rig the whole thing in their own favour, then the Greens are obviously the ones for you (unless you're from Scotland or Wales where the SNP and Plaid Cymru also have justifiable claims to represent progressive Brexit-sceptics).

But somehow the Greens got absolutely steamrollered by the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, welfare-vandalising, wage-repressing, infrastructure-underinvesting Lib-Dem neoliberals who were the venal self-serving charlatans who wilfully helped the Tories lay the groundwork for Brexit to happen in the first place by trashing our wages, public services, social safety net, and living standards between 2010 and 2015.

Somehow, out of the minority of those who could be arsed to vote in the Euro elections (just 35.6% bothered), the majority of the anti-Brexit vote went to the disgustingly unrepentant Lib-Dems, rather than to the Green Party who had exactly the same anti-Brexit stance, but with absolutely none of the austerity blood on their hands.
 

The rise of the Greens in Germany puts the UK Greens' failure into perspective. Despite no Brexit bandwagon to leap onto the German Greens doubled their vote to 20.5% and bagged 21 MEPs, meaning they finished in second place behind Angela Merkel's centre-right CDU.

In the days after the election the German Greens have risen further with the post-Euro election bounce lifting them to the top of an opinion poll for the first time in their history on 27%.

Meanwhile in the UK it's the austerity-enforcing, wage-repressing, renewable subsidy-slashing, public service-trashing, welfare-vandalising, Royal Mail-privatising Lib-Dems who are gleefully basking in the post-Euro election bounce at the top of outlier polls.

It's difficult to get down to why the Green campaign has faltered so badly in the UK, when all the factors seemed to be pointing in their favour. But as someone who is broadly supportive of their party (especially on stuff like opposing austerity, protecting the environment, and renationalisation) I'll have a go:

Mainstream media bias: The Greens have fought tooth and nail for years to try to get fairer representation in the mainstream media, but to no avail. They're continually locked out of election debates, denied party political broadcasts, and treated as a minor party, even though they went into the 2019 Euro elections with triple the seats of the supposedly bigger Lib-Dems.

Leadership structure: The Greens have an unusual joint leadership between Siân Berry and Jonathan Bartley instead of one high profile leader. It's possible that this unusual leadership structure make them seem more like well meaning political amateurs than a serious political party. However this doesn't explain the disparity between the UK and German Greens because they too have a shared leadership structure. Perhaps the polarised hyper-partisan, and divisive nature of British politics means Brits are somewhat less open to ideas like shared leadership and compromise?

Leadership figures: One of the German Greens' co-leaders is Robert Habeck who is an almost ubiquitous figure in the German media and a former government minister in the Schleswig-Holstein region, and the other co-leader is Annalena Baerbock who is a member of the Bundestag (the main German parliament). Neither Jonathan Bartley nor Siân Berry have anything like as high profiles (Bartley is a local councillor in Lambeth, and Berry has a seat in the London Assembly which is an institution barely mentioned by ordinary folk in London, let alone us yokels outside of it). Unfortunately Caroline Lucas is still the only major figure in the UK Green Party ranks, but it's understandable that she wants to concentrate on her duties in parliament rather than acting as party figurehead.

Naivety: All the stuff about forming electoral pacts with the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters before the Euro elections was extremely poor from a Green perspective. Instead of positioning themselves as making a more or less identical/interchangeable anti-Brexit offer as the two overtly neoliberal Remain parties, they should have strongly and clearly distanced themselves and made it clear that they were the only UK-wide Remain party willing to address the actual causes of Brexit in the first place (austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, welfare vandalism, infrastructure underinvestment ...). Presenting themselves as Lib-Dem allies in the fight against Brexit allowed the ever cynical Lib-Dems to use "tactical voting guides" to lure people into abandoning the Greens and voting Lib-Dem as the supposedly biggest Remain party. Failure to heed the basic  political axiom "never trust the Lib-Dems" is remarkably naive stuff.

General antipathy: One factor that it would be easy to overlook is the general UK public antipathy towards the Greens. We've all seen people dismissing them as mung bean-weaving, sandal-wearing, hippy-dippy fruitcakes over the years. Maybe the Greens seriously need to think about toughening up their image as seasoned battlers in the existential crisis that out-of-control capitalism is inflicting on our planet?

Lack of clarity: By presenting themselves as being basically inter-changeable Remain protest votes with the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters, the Greens threw away their chance to explain why they were the better alternative and handed all the political momentum to the more establishment-friendly Lib-Dems.

Poor strategy: In the final days before the EU election practically all I noticed from Green activists on Twitter were efforts to pinch left-leaning Labour voters by attacking Labour's Brexit position, rather than focusing on convincing the sizeable and defined Remain demographic to vote Green instead of the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems. Instead of appealing to a large well defined demographic as the best option with no austerity baggage, they were wasting their efforts on desperately trying to erode a final few Labour votes from a party already reduced down to its core support.
 

Ineffectiveness: Even though a lot Green effort was expended on trying to pinch Labour votes during the the final days of the Euro election campaign, the evidence suggests that far more Labour supporters deserted to the pro-austerity Lib-Dems than to the anti-austerity Greens! If the Greens failed to even convince Labour deserters to back them instead of the pro-austerity Lib-Dem Tory collaborators, they clearly failed quite spectacularly. Someone within the Green ranks would have to conduct the autopsy but letting millions of left and centre-left votes slip through their fingers to be gobbled up by the orthodox neoliberal Lib-Dems was a disaster.

Differences in the traditional left: The traditional left SPD party in Germany has completely lost its way and people are crying out for an alternative. Jeremy Corbyn has revitalised the Labour Party, binned the orthodox neoliberal tripe that was driving voters away in their millions, and returned to genuine democratic socialism. Even though the low-turnout Euro Elections were incredibly poor for Labour, they haven't been floundering as badly as the German Social Democrat Party for the past four years. Coming up against a stronger traditional left than the German Greens still doesn't explain how the UK Greens let so many votes slip through their fingers to the Lib-Dems though.

Brexit fixation: Perhaps the German Greens did so well not despite the lack of a Brexit bandwagon to jump on, but because of it? Perhaps jumping on the exact same People's Vote bandwagon as the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters ended up obscuring and diluting the core Green policies that differentiate them from the pro-austerity neoliberal parties they decided to side with? Perhaps Brexit brain worms cost the Greens their best ever chance at making the breakthrough to the political big time?

It would be a futile task to try to identify one single reason that the Greens faltered and fumbled millions of potential votes through their fingers in the UK to the benefit of a bunch of unrepentant neoliberals, while the Greens surged to position themselves as the 2nd party in German politics, but it's important for UK Greens to avoid celebrating marginal gains when they should have been making significant headway, and for them to get a feel of what went so wrong so they can learn from their mistakes.

If you've got any other ideas about why the Greens faltered so badly, feel free to share them in the comments.

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Brexit is a £1 trillion con job

Just over a decade ago the British state conjured up staggering amounts of money in order to save the City of London financial sector from insolvency.

This unprecedented tsunami of cash included £200 billion in liquidity support, £76 billion to bail out RBS and Lloyds, £40 billion to bail out Bradford and Bingley and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, £280 billion in insurance cover for financial sector assets, and £435 billion in quantitative easing.

In 2010 the general public decided to punish Labour for having been in power during the financial sector insolvency crisis by replacing them with a Tory/Lib-Dem coalition (despite the fact that the Tories had been squealing for even more financial sector deregulation even right up until the financial sector meltdown was kicking off!).

The Tories and their despicable Lib-Dem enablers immediately began loading the cost of the bailouts onto ordinary British people via a ruinous programme of austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, devastating public service cuts, deliberate under-investment in infrastructure, and vandalism of the social safety net.

Meanwhile they continually lavished vast tax cuts and extravagant handouts on corporations and the mega-rich, as they raided the infrastructure budgets of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and northern England to further boost spending in already wealthier areas like London and the south east.

The consequences of these policies were absolutely dire. The slowest economic recovery in two Centuries, the longest period of real terms wage depreciation since records began, soaring child poverty and in-work poverty, unprecedented cuts to the education system, unprecedented cuts to local government budgets, catastrophically failing public services like the NHS, police & fire service, tens of thousands driven into early graves, the most unaffordable housing in history ...

And then David Cameron decided to gamble the entire nation's future in order to nick a few thousand UKIP votes at the 2015 General Election.

An environment of collapsing wages, insecure jobs, soaring poverty, failing public services, unaffordable housing, and an annihilated social security system was exactly what the Brexiteers needed in order to push Leave marginally over the winning line in the 2016 referendum.

All they needed to do was blame the consequences of these devastating domestic policies on immigrants and the EU, then watch the votes flood in as the Tories and Lib-Dems outright refused to admit the truth, that it was actually them to blame for the living standards collapse, not immigration or the EU.

The austerity fanatics and their vile austerity-enabling sidekicks couldn't counteract the lie without implicating themselves, so they just sat back allowed the lie to stand, and allowed Leave to win.

Britain has been in a state of constitutional chaos ever since, especially so after Theresa May decided to give the British public the chance to get rid of the Tories who created this Brexit chaos in the first place, and instead of seizing the opportunity we decided to intensify the chaos by keeping them in power but without a majority so that the government was beholden to the Northern Irish DUP sectarians and the ERG Brextemists in the Tory ranks.

Hence huge numbers of financial institutions simply giving up on all the chaos and uncertainty in the UK to seek economic refuge in the safety of the Single Market, taking £1 trillion in assets with them as they flee.

Dublin, Frankfurt, Paris, and Luxemburg being the main beneficiaries so far.

So that's £1 trillion in financial sector bailouts. The British people being forced to cover the cost of these bailouts through Tory/Lib-Dem austerity fanaticism. Then a furious backlash against collapsing living standards resulting in the financial sector pissing off out of Britain taking £1 trillion in assets with them!

The saddest thing of all is that millions of Brits remain absolutely incapable of seeing this con go on right in front of their eyes, and it's not just an inability to synthesise information without allowing the mainstream media propagandists to do their thinking for them that's causing people to completely miss the bigger picture, it's an extraordinary level of political forgetfulness.

Remainers flocking to support the Lib-Dems seem to have completely forgotten* all of the Lib-Dem lies, and their red-handed culpability in laying the groundwork for Brexit by helping the Tories wantonly trash our living standards for five devastating years.

It's just four years since the Coalition ended, yet huge numbers of people have apparently already forgotten how appallingly the Lib-Dems behaved, and we're somehow back to trusting them again, despite all their betrayals, despite their austerity-collusion, despite the fact that their entirely unrepentant leader Vince Cable wilfully served as George Osborne's austerity hatchet man at the treasury for five years, and despite the fact he defrauded the UK taxpayer of hundreds of millions by selling off the Royal Mail property portfolio at a fraction of its true value.

If people can't even remember four years ago, what hope is there of them remembering how the very same financial sector that's scarpering with £1 trillion in assets today were the beneficiaries of £1 trillion in bailouts 11 years ago?

So what are the lessons here? 

• Brexit is a chaotic and ongoing economic disaster.

• There's nothing patriotic about supporting the diminishment of your own nation.

• Capitalism has no national loyalties, even to the extent of scarpering just a decade after being lavishly bailed out at the public expense.

• People are apparently so forgetful the bankers' bailouts are ancient history to them, and they're even back to trusting the Lib-Dems again!

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OR

* = Well, either they've forgotten, or they were actually perfectly fine with ruinous austerity fanaticism all along because they were socially and economically insulated from it. So they've either somehow forgotten it all in the space of four years, or they're a bunch of horrible "I'm alright Jack" wankers who simply didn't mind austerity malice at all because the dreadful consequences always fell on other people, meaning they're exactly the kind of insufferably aloof and uncaring metropolitan elitists their opponents always claimed that they were.

Why are the BBC actively amplifying Lib-Dem lies?

Last night on BBC Question Time the Lib-Dem MP and party leadership candidate Jo Swinson told a blatant lie claiming that just 4% of kids from Govan in Glasgow end up going to university, blaming "lack of aspiration" and "lack of investment".

The real figure is that 22.8% go on to university or higher education colleges, which is not particularly high compared to more affluent areas, but 570% higher than Swinson's unsourced claim.

The worst thing about this Lib-Dem lie isn't that Swinson used fake statistics, it's the pure classism of making out that kids from poor areas like Govan are less likely to succeed academically because of "lack of aspiration".

The lie also seemed to be motivated by a desire to terrify middle class English voters by raising the awful caricature of the terrifying working-class Govan shit hole (which is a bit like using Moss Side's fearsome reputation to terrify southerners about the whole of northern England).

Then there's the fact that the Lib-Dems actively helped their Tory mates to absolutely trash investment in education between 2010 and 2015 resulting in an unprecedented collapse in per pupil funding.

Furthermore the Lib-Dems helped their Tory chums to significantly lower infrastructure investment in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the north of England, while massively boosting investment in London and the South East.

This means that that any kids from working class communities who do overcome the odds to succeed out of austerity-ravaged areas will end up being drawn away to London and the South East if they want the best jobs and opportunities. A brain-drain scenario that leaves abandoned northern communities even further behind.

And let's not forget that Swinson and her Lib-Dem pals' broken promise not to hike tuition fees, resulting in English students facing the highest fees in the world to study at public universities (Scotland escaped this grotesque Lib-Dem betrayal thanks to devolution and the SNP government's commitment to education as a right, not a commodity to be traded by the rich).

Even more concerning than Swinson's classism, lies, and white-washing of her own party's track record in government is the way the BBC uncritically amplified what she said.

Of course nobody expects the host Fiona Bruce to know precise higher education attainment statistics for every local area in the UK off the top of her head, but we could at least expect the BBC to check that statistics aren't lies before they tweet a clip of the lie, with an uncritical repetition of the lie written in the actual text of the Tweet!

If the BBC had any intention of actually holding the political class to account, they'd fact check the all of the Question Time clips they're thinking about tweeting to make sure they're not amplifying lies, and then publicly call out people who get caught lying on their show in order to actually hold them to account.

But far from calling this lie out, the BBC actively helped Swinson spread it even further by uncritically retweeting it.

Middle class Brexit-sceptic Lib-Dem types are often the first to complain when the BBC actively helps to amplify Brexiteer lies and false promises, but in order to avoid being total hypocrites they also have to complain when one of the darlings of their pro-austerity, pro-student debt, pro-privatisation, anti-investment, welfare-vandalising Lib-Dems spouts made up statistics. Especially when the made up statistics are intended to push the classist trope about kids in poor working class areas "lacking aspiration", as if it's their own fault for having severely reduced life opportunities, when in reality it was the Lib-Dems and their Tory mates who spent five ruinous years slashing education funding and deliberately rigging the UK economy against kids from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the north of England.

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Elitist rule-bending should have no place in the Labour Party

During the 2016 Labour leadership elections the right-wing controlled NEC orchestrated a massive purge of ordinary Labour membesr designed to prevent them voting for Jeremy Corbyn in the leadership election.

Literally thousands of people were instantly kicked out for the most trivial of offences. Stuff like retweeting a Green Party politician, admitting that they used to support another political party in the years before they joined Labour, and even for tweeting that they love the Foo Fighters.

There were no tears of frustration and screams of outrage from Labour right-wingers or elitist hacks in the mainstream media.

They didn't speak out because they tacitly approved of what was going on, knowing that a mass purge of ordinary members in order to rig the leadership election against Corbyn was their only chance of crushing Labour party socialism and returning the party to orthodox neoliberalism.

Their plot failed spectacularly because they would have had to have purged well over 120,000 members, but their absolute contempt for ordinary party members, and their willingness to abuse the rules for their own advantage was made absolutely and undeniably clear.

Fast forward to 2019 and these same Labour right-wingers and neoliberal media hacks are screeching with outrage that Alistair Campbell got himself kicked out of the Labour Party for openly bragging that he voted for the unrepentant, pro-austerity, welfare-vandalising, wage-repressing, Royal Mail-privatising Lib-Dem neoliberals who wilfully helped the Tories lay the groundwork for Brexit by trashing our living standards for five ruinous years.

So after saying absolutely nothing to condemn the bending of the party rules to purge thousands of ordinary party members in 2016, they're suddenly spewing outrage because the party rules haven't been bent in the complete opposite direction to let a high profile party figure publicly flaunt the party rule that you don't campaign and vote for rival political parties.

The distinction here is absolutely clear, and yet again it's elitism.

Labour right-wingers and mainstream media hacks don't give a shit about ordinary people like you and I, and wouldn't dream of speaking up for us when the rules are being deliberately bent to punish "the lower orders" for their political opinions.

But when it's one of their fellow elitists from deep within the Westminster establishment class getting punished for wantonly defying the party rules, suddenly it's tears of outrage and demands for an exception to a rule that would certainly have seen any ordinary member instantly purged from the party at any point in its history.

This idea that the rules should be bent to discriminate against ordinary people, but bent the complete other way to excuse those at the top of the party is outright and ugly elitism, and there's no excuse for it whatever, especially in a party like Labour.

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Tory austerity fanaticism is nonsensical backwards-economics

The Tory austerity myth told us that the only way to reduce public borrowing was a massive programme of public sector spending cuts.

During the austerity years the Tories and their Lib-Dem enablers pushed all kinds of ruinous policies that resulted in the slowest economic recovery in centuries, and the worst collapse in the value of UK workers' wages since records began, but perhaps the most damaging aspect of all was their deliberate reduction in infrastructure investment so that the UK became the lowest-investment country in the entire developed world.

The bulk of the Tory austerity cuts (especially reductions in local government funding and cancelled infrastructure projects) have been deliberately aimed at non-Tory voting areas like the North East, South Wales, the central belt of Scotland, and the former industrial cities of Yorkshire, the North West, and Midlands.

Infrastructure investment is generally a strong fiscal multiplier, especially at times where the cost of borrowing is exceptionally low (like the last decade), because this kind of spending creates jobs and economic demand in the short-term, and increases the future economic potential of an economy in the long-term (high-skill, high-tech, high-pay companies are far more likely to locate in places with great infrastructure, than places with failing public services and outdated and over-crowded public transport links).

It seems too obvious to have to spell it out in simple like this, but a near-decade of Tory austerity fanaticism has proven that huge swathes of the UK population will simply believe that the only way to reduce borrowing is to wantonly slash spending on the things that actually increase economic potential and prosperity!

The latest evidence that "let's cut our way to growth" austerity fanaticism is completely backwards comes from the Office for National Statistics data on economic surpluses and deficits by region, which demonstrates a strong correlation with their data on investment on stuff like infrastructure and public transport.

It's surely no coincidence that the two regions with by far the highest levels of public investment in infrastructure and public transport also have the biggest per capita surpluses, while the three most austerity-blighted regions with the lowest levels of investment are the ones with the worst per capita deficits.

Of course this isn't a hard and fast rule, because the North West and Scotland buck the trend slightly in the graph with larger per capita deficits despite higher rates of investment, but it's important to note that these regions have also suffered much more severely due to Tory austerity fanaticism compared to regions with higher levels of habitual Tory-voting, like the South West, East of England, and East Midlands.

All the evidence points to the fact that the Tories have got it completely backwards. That cutting the deficit is achieved by increased public investment, and that low-investment high-austerity regions continue running deficits.

The more you cut, the worse the deficit.

But this blatant Tory backwardness won't bother most people.

Most of the mainstream media will continue refusing to explain explaining the relatively simple fact that austerity fanaticism does exactly the opposite of what the Tories claimed it would, so they people won't even know about it, and many of those who do somehow come across the mountains of evidence that austerity is completely backwards economic gibberish will simply ignore it because it actually takes bravery to admit that you've been the subject of a decade-long con job, when it's much easier on the ego to just ignore the compelling evidence that you got totally duped.

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People's Vote are just as willing to use deceptive propaganda as the Brextremists

Despite all the numpties trying to pretend that Labour's Brexit position is too complicated to understand, it was always a quite simple strategy of trying to de-escalate and de-toxify Brexit by reconciling Leave and Remain instead of picking either the 52% or the 48% and tailoring their policies exclusively for them.

With Labour's vote share collapsing to leave them in 3rd place between the (exclusively 52%) Brexit Party and the (exclusively 48%) Lib-Dems, it's quite clear that people don't actually want Brexit reconciliation.

It doesn't matter how much it actually makes sense to try to de-escalate Brexit so that it doesn't continue degenerating towards an outright culture war between the two polar extremes, there's no way to pretend that it's popular.

Compromise and reconciliation are deeply unsexy political concepts when most people seem to want the certainty of picking one side or the other and naively hoping that their side doesn't end up on the losing side of the culture war they're gearing up for.

If I was forced to pick a side in a do-or-die showdown between the two polar extremes of the debate I'd obviously end up on the Remain side because "no deal" is such an unbelievably stupid concept that would trash our economy and absolutely burn all of the UK's negotiating capital the instant we did it.

But there's no denying that the Remain faction is just as riddled with ideological militants, opportunists, and outright liars as the opposite end of the spectrum.

The People's Vote graph in the article header is proof of how far these people will go to deceive.

After months of relentlessly misrepresenting Labour's position (oppose "no deal", repeatedly oppose Tory Brexit, push for a general Election, propose a fail safe least harmful version of Brexit, support calls for a final say referendum) as nasty pro-Brexit fanaticism in order to drive voters into the arms of the Lib-Dems, they're suddenly claiming Labour as a Remain party because it's the only possible way to make it look like the pro-Brexit parties (Brexit Party, Tories, UKIP) didn't win a bigger vote share than the exclusively Remain parties.

The weirdest thing about this kind of deception is the cultish myopia of it.

It's not designed to deceive Leave voters into change their mind, nor to deceive the undecided.

It's pure self-delusion aimed at convincing their own tribe that they won a clear majority, when the only way to create this deception is to suddenly appropriate the support of the very people they've been relentlessly misrepresenting, attacking and abusing for over a year in order to erode their support and pinch their voters!

An herein lies the danger of an another roll of the dice referendum.

It doesn't matter how much you dislike the Brextremists, it's obvious that their propaganda is clearly and unambiguously designed to win people over to their cause. They won the 2016 referendum, and Farage's Brexit Party just stormed these Euro elections. No matter how much we may dislike it, their propaganda is effective, and it clearly works.

Even though Remain lost in 2016 and they've got a lot of convincing to do in order to make up the ground, People's Vote propaganda like this isn't designed to win people over at all, it's purely self-righteous reassurance for the echo chamber.

The only people retweeting this blatantly deceptive graph are clearly on a Remainer self-delusion trip.

They don't want to admit that they've wasted the last three years so badly that despite all the Brexit chaos, and uncertainty, and deadlock, the exclusively 52% parties still somehow bagged a bigger vote share than the exclusively 48% parties.

The Tories have done such a spectacular job of ballsing Brexit up that Remain should be winning the argument all over the country by now, but their absolute obsession with a sore-loser referendum, their mobilisation behind the pro-austerity Lib-Dems who helped the Tories cause Brexit in the first place, and their spreading of absurd self-deception nonsense like this clearly answers the question of how Brexit Party swept the vast majority of English and Welsh constituencies.

It turns out that an awful lot of Remainers aren't even remotely interested in reaching out to left-behind communities to explain that it was domestic government policies like neoliberalism, privatisation mania, austerity fanaticism, wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and vandalism of the social safety net that caused the living standards collapse, not immigrants and the EU.

In fact they're so uninterested in winning this argument they've actually flocked to support the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation Lib-Dem neoliberals, which is all very well in the mainly-metropolitan and well-to-do patches of the country that never experienced the full force of ruinous Tory austerity, but Remainers actively rewarding the austerity-enablers makes winning the argument even harder in the much more numerous places that were wracked by austerity fanaticism, and just turned out in much bigger numbers to vote for the far-right Brexit Party Faragists.
These people aren't interested in effective campaigning at all, all they're interested in is smugly congratulating themselves that they were right all along.

If they wilfully refuse to deal with the issues and injustices that caused Brexit in the first place in preference for spreading ridiculously misleading infographics designed to convince themselves that they won when they're still somehow losing, then they're never going to triumph in the "another roll of the dice" referendum they've invested so much of their time, effort, and resources on demanding are they?

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Theresa May's tears of self-pity

With tears in her eyes Theresa May announced that she will be resigning on June 7th.

Some people will feel pity for her, and believe the mainstream media hagiographies about how "she did her best", but the fact that she cried tears of self-pity as she resigned simply serve to illustrate her selfishness and callousness.

She cried no tears for the Windrush Brits she unlawfully discriminated against and even forced into exile overseas.

She cried no tears for the victims of the Grenfell fire when she rocked up to the scene and refused to even meet the survivors.

She cried no tears for the four million British kids growing up in dire poverty, and even sought to scrap their free school meals and replace them with a 7p per child breakfast.

She cried no tears for the millions of sick and disabled people that her government has systematically abused to the point of literally thousands of people being treated like idle scroungers and told that they're "fit for work" just weeks before their deaths.

She cried no tears for the millions of people who suffered the devastating consequences of Tory austerity fanaticism, and even lied through her teeth that "austerity is over" while continuing it.

She cried no tears for the Yemeni children blown to pieces by the tyrannical Saudi war criminals, in fact she kept on signing more and more arms contracts with them despite knowing that they're using British weapons to commit their war crimes.

Yet she cried tears for herself as she finally let go of her grip on political power.

No tears for the Windrush Brits she deported

No tears for the Grenfell fire victims

No tears for the disabled people her government has systematically abused

No tears for the 4million kids growing up in dire poverty

Tears of self-pity when she resignspic.twitter.com/4HQI78ZkiI

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) May 24, 2019

Many people will argue that she was the worst Prime Minister ever, but in a way she was actually the perfect Tory Prime Minister. A perfect distillation of the utterly selfish, greed is a virtue, rob the poor to give to the rich, 'no such thing as society' Tory philosophy.

The only person she's ever felt sorry for is herself, so don't be fooled into taking pity on her.

If you want to feel sorry for anyone, take a moment to remember the millions of victims of her policies.

And if you don't want to do that, then have some pity on yourself and your fellow Brits, because whichever Brextremist the tiny clique of Tory party members pick out as our next Prime Minister is surely going to be even worse than she was.

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Neoliberalism is in decline, but don't celebrate too soon

Just a few weeks ago the Tories suffered their worst local election results in a quarter of a century.

This week they're going to get so smashed at the Euro elections it'll almost certainly be their worst electoral result in history. Most of the polls put them battling with the Greens for 4th/5th place.

Over 80% of the public think Theresa May has done a bad job of negotiating Brexit, and she's so unpopular within her own party that the Tory top brass are trying to tear up the party rule book in a desperate effort to force her out within six months of the last effort to depose her*.

A malicious and incompetent leader selfishly clinging onto power for as long as possible while her political party disintegrates around her.

This is what neoliberalism in decline looks like.

For four decades the Tory party have relentlessly served the interests of the mega-rich elitists who bankrolled their operation at the expense of everyone else, and at the expense of the UK economy as a whole.

They were bad enough before 1979, but when Thatcher injected the toxic hard-right political virus of neoliberalism into Westminster and the UK government they've turned into absolute monsters, continually asset stripping the UK and transferring as much wealth as possible from the ordinary majority to the tiny mega-rich minority.

Entire working class industries shut down as part of their ideological war on trade unions, communities all over Britain left to rot, continual government attacks on workers' rights and working conditions, ruinous austerity dogma, unprecedented wage repression, devastating public service cuts, deliberate under-investment in infrastructure, housing and education, wanton vandalism of the social safety net ...

Meanwhile they've provided a continual banquet of tax cuts, lavish handouts, and privatisation scams for their mega-rich backers to gorge themselves upon.

The ruination they've inflicted on ordinary workers, the poor, the vulnerable, the disabled, and left behind communities all over the United Kingdom is finally coming back onto them.

Their neoliberal policies have left millions of people broke, stressed and looking at the future without hope, so it's nice to think that just for once these elitist toffs are in a complete mess and looking at the future with dread, because it means they're getting just a tiny taste of the panic and distress their neoliberal agenda has inflicted on millions of other people's lives for the last four decades.

It's extraordinary to think that just four years ago all three of the main Westminster establishment parties went into the 2015 General Election with pro-austerity pro-privatisation orthodox neoliberal manifestos, yet now the godawful Lib-Dems look like they're going to be the last neoliberal standing!

Thankfully Labour have shifted back to their traditional pro-investment, pro-worker, pro-public ownership stance since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, and the Tories are on the brink of abandoning the neoliberal orthodoxy altogether in order to chase the repulsive extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic who have been abandoning them in droves since Theresa May completely banjaxed the Brexit negotiations.

Labour's position is to try to reverse the damage of the last four decades by investing in our public services and infrastructure projects, giving Britain a pay rise, and making corporations and the mega-rich stop dodging tax and pay their fair share.

Under whichever Brextremist replaces Theresa May the Tories are going to try to use the dire consequences of their own neoliberal policies in order to push an even more fanatically right-wing agenda.

And the Lib-Dems will be left in the abandoned neoliberal territory begging for a return to "more of the same" and facing the eventual choice of whether to help Labour undo the damage, or back the far-right Tories.

It's pretty damned obvious what they'll chose, given that they participated in the 2010-15 coalition government that unlawfully discriminated against and deported black British citizens, introduced deeply illiberal secret courts, imposed ruinous austerity dogma, unlawfully attacked workers' rights, stripped the police and fire services to the bone, trashed our future economic potential by under-investing in infrastructure, gagged charities, flogged the Royal Mail off at miles below its true value, turned Libya into a lawless terrorist breeding ground, gutted local government funding, delivered unprecedented rates of wage repression, privatised 3/4 of English secondary schools into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers, systematically abused sick and disabled people, and so much more ...

They're hardly likely to back a Labour government intent on undoing as much of this damage as possible, so they'll stand in opposition to Labour in order to protect this appalling stuff that they actually see as 'gains', and if the chance comes up to form another coalition with the Tories, they'll obviously jump at it, because if Theresa May's fascistic Hostile Environment and vile anti-immigrant hatemongering as Home Secretary weren't too much for them between 2010 and 2015, they'll likely be fine with whatever far-right antics Boris Johnson/Dominic Raab/Michael Gove get up to won't they?

The ongoing collapse of orthodox neoliberalism means there's going to have to be a paradigm shift in British politics.

Either we try to reverse course and undo the worst of the four decades of neoliberal damage, or we double down and embrace the far-right.

This means anyone attempting to occupy the rapidly evacuated faux centre-ground of orthodox neoliberalism is going to have to accept the risk that they're going to end up backing the far-right by default, because neoliberalism has an awful lot more in common with outright fascism than it does with democratic socialism.

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* = I'm not even a fan of an "another roll of the dice" referendum but it's funny how the Tories think they should be allowed to vote again within a matter of months because they've changed their minds, but the British public shouldn't have another say after over three years isn't it?